There aren't any games that stress a computer quite like Battlefield 3 does. Unless you have your graphics cards, processor, motherboard components, hard disk, router, game configuration and general internet connection all running in perfect harmony you can suffer frame drops, lag spikes and general stuttering.

I suffered all three and it took a long time to get to the bottom of it all. You may wish to try the following in reverse order, but here's what I did to fix a stuttering issue whereby a lag spike would hit every two-to-three seconds and make the game virtually unplayable.

The problem looks like "rubber banding" - where you run along and then get reset a few metres back over and over again. But the problem wasn't caused by lag on a server. It was ultimately caused by my computer's components struggling to run together. The final thing that fixed it was updating the BIOS of my motherboard, but I did many other things before that. Here's a useful checklist for things to try if you're experiencing stuttering problems on your PC.

1. There were many internet rumours which said Nvidia's latest drivers broke the game and that installing older ones fixed things. If this ever was true, it isn't now. Always make sure you have the latest graphics card drivers.

2. Access the console within BF3 during the game (by pressing) " ~ " and type the following:

Render.perfoverlayvisible 1

This will give you graphs showing CPU and GPU performance. The fact my CPU was spiking suggested to me that the problem wasn't in the band but in the box. This may help you diagnose your problem.

Another potentially useful tool is:

render.drawfps 1

Which displays your FPS

3. I was concerned that my old hard disk might be struggling (highly unlikely) or at least malfunctioning in some way (connection, cable etc). Upgrading to an SSD, which I was going to do anyway, didn't help things.

Render ahead numbers can be 0, 1, 2, 3
Triple Buffering is either 0 or 1 to turn it off and on.

5. Next I tried to Set the Affinity - this is forcing the game to run on fewer cores. The game is optimized for multi core but if a processor has something wrong with one of them it could misfire. Some people have claimed that this fixed everything. To do this, run the game, start Task Manager, Right-Click on the game in the list and choose Set Affinity. De-select all but one core. Note that if this doesn't work, change it back as using fewer cores will hamper performance. For this reason, this should also be viewed as a temporary/last resort fix.

6. Although I suspected my components were misfiring the first thing to check was the internet connection. I have a good Billion router with a fast ADSL2+ connection, but were the demands of the game proving too much? First up I made sure I had the latest firmware for the router. It transpired mine was ancient and there had been ten subsequent revisions. Upgrading was a good job done but made no difference to my BF3 problem.

7. Next up was checking my ADSL profile. Here, my ISP offers several different types of profile which I can change any time - although the changes take up to an hour to process and reset the connection when they occur. I was originally on a High Speed profile which aimed to boost speeds at the expense of reliability and ping. I set it to a profile which gave me a marginally slower peak speed but improved my ping - it dropped from 32ms to 20ms on my closest server. Hopefully, this was it. Nope.

8. I was now confident that the internet connection was fine but that the processor was struggling to communicate with other components. So I updated all of my motherboard drivers. I hadn't done this for years and some drivers were the original versions. I did this by going to the manufacturer's site and downloaded every possible component (including those like onboard audio which I didn't use) update. Lo and behold - it worked! No more stuttering... until I next rebooted when it reappeared.

9. I was pretty sure I was on to something here so I looked at my computer's BIOS. It was version 1.0. The latest was version 15. I installed that and hey presto, the problem went away and hasn't been seen for months.

If you have any other tips, or if any of these worked for you. Let us know below.

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Comments (6)

derp :

dude, do NOT turn off triple buffering. It's actually increasing the fps, with the expense of vram (don't use it if you have small vram, the ram/ how many GB in the graphic card).

If you want, like me, download BF3 settings editor by realmware, and put everything down in the to the lowest in "Graphics" tab. If you still lag, just put lower custom resolution, adjust to something that does not lag. For me, because I have a slow laptop, I put it to 320x180 resolution so I can have 40-80 fps.

emma :

BF3 NOOB :

09 Jan 2013 5:55:50pm

Bought BF3 a last year finally got around to installing it. After cleaning up my PC BF3 still lagged like shit. Updating Bios fixed majority of it although loading times still take well over a 2 minutes and there is some audio lag

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